Girl Through Glass Page 24

  Maurice looks like he has come out of a dream. He lowers his chin, and his eyebrows pinch together. This is the Maurice she recognizes. “Of course,” he says. “Mira. I’m sorry. I should have called.”

  Called? she thinks. When did he ever call? She called him once—years ago—the night it snowed. But never has he called her. And where would he call her, at her father and Judy’s? Impossible. She’s never even given him her number there.

  As they all walk to the living room, Rob rests a hand on Maurice’s arm. Who is this man?

  The living room is brightly lit and smells of cigar smoke. There are two glasses of wine on the glass coffee table and a game of Monopoly in progress.

  Maurice disappears into the kitchen.

  Rob sits on the brown leather sofa. “You’re a dancer?” His laugh is big and warm. It makes her want to like him, though she knows her only real option is to hate him.

  She nods.

  “Maurice and I have overlapping interests.” He smiles. “Opera, dance. Anything that was around during Louis XIV’s court.”

  Maurice comes back with a bowl of cookies. He places the margarine-colored bowl on the coffee table with the same collection of cookies that Mira has not touched in a year.

  “Cookies!” says Rob. “Maury!” Maury! Maury?

  Maurice retreats to the kitchen.

  “I think Maurice hates me,” she whispers to Rob.

  “Oh, no,” he says. “He’s not the type. He’s a pussycat. . . .”

  She smiles as Judy would when you’re saying something she doesn’t believe. “He was supposed to meet me tonight. For dinner.”

  Maurice reappears with a plate of sliced apples and celery and a small, metal tin of soft cheese that immediately stinks up the room. He puts the plate down but does not sit down. He stands gazing down at them, his face greenish, and working. Some of his slicked-back hair has come undone and stands up on his head like tufts of grass. Mira has a violent surge of hate for him. Or is it love? She feels like crying. Why does he hate her so much?

  Rob seems to be chewing something over. He looks back and forth at Maurice and Mira. “Well,” he says. He stands. “I think I have interrupted something—”

  “No!” says Maurice.

  Rob puts down a Monopoly piece he holds in his hand. It’s the tiny, rearing stallion that gleams metallic. “Maybe you can continue for me, Mira. I own all the railroads.” He takes a card from his wallet and places it on the coffee table next to the gleaming horse. “In case—” he begins.

  But he doesn’t finish. Instead, he smiles, slips on his loafers and sports jacket and walks toward the door.

  Maurice follows him. Mira can hear low voices in the hallway. She can’t make out what they are saying.

  Mira reaches out and picks up a piece of an apple, already browning around the edges, and takes a bite. It is waxy, too soft. She has a weird sense of hovering above herself and the room, staring down at it. She sees herself holding the apple, the piles of paper money, an ashtray ripe with ashes, and the beaten-up end of a well-used cigar. She has never really thought of this apartment as a place Maurice lives. No, she thinks of it as their place they inhabit together, where she dances for him in dark and silence and so becomes again the only dancing girl in the world.

  She takes the card Rob left on the table and, without even looking at it, slips it into her pocket. Then she picks up the little horse and examines it. It’s heavier in her hand than she would have thought for something so small. She studies it—the tiny piece is well fashioned. The features of the horse are distinct, but those of the rider are vague, only hollows in the metal that suggest eyes, nose. She shivers, clutches the thing so tightly in her hand, its sharp edges dig into her skin, making her eyes burn.

  After too many moments, Maurice comes back into the room. He stares at her with a ghostly paleness. His eyes burn with something new. She doesn’t care. He is hers again. She will do what he says. She will dance for him. It will all be okay. After all, she’s still a Mr. B girl. She’ll still be in The Nutcracker—if not Marie, and not Head Angel, at least a Polichinelle. Then she’ll dance in Workshop, maybe Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. Then she’ll be a company apprentice. She opens her hand to show the figurine, then slips it into her back pocket. “Your turn,” she says.

  He lunges at her, grabs for her pocket. “Give that to me,” he says. He’s shouting. His mouth is open.

  “You’ll have to get it,” she says, turning to run across the room. He grabs at her pocket, circling her body with his arm. He smells different, not like oranges and cinnamon, but like moist air, like a wild animal. He tries again, but she squirms away and runs, squealing, to the other side of the room, then onward, through the dim rooms until she gets to Pavlova’s pointe shoe. He’s breathing behind her. She hears herself laugh as he catches her and then, in the next instant, he’s yanking at her pants. She has no leotard and tights on today; what emerges is just skin, the skin of her belly, her thighs. She’s on the floor. She grabs his shirt, saying, “I am afraid.” But it’s too late.

  “Is this what you want?” he says. She is quiet now. He bends her knees up to her armpits and shoves himself inside her. It is a stiff tent in there. He pushes himself into her again and again, destroying everything he has built.

  She sleeps, or something like it. They are on the floor of the room with the old photos of dancers. Like two trees’ branches tangled up together. A forest. Together they make a forest of limbs. She is trembling like dry leaves in a heavy wind. He is bony, ancient, gray, and powdery. She is young, white, and sinewy. Her legs like steel covered in flesh. The corners of her mouth curve upward in a smile, but it is not a smile. She is like a thing falling—in space falling—to the ground. A dried leaf, a twig, a piece of dried skin, discarded, passed over even by the street sweeper’s brush.

  MY

  REMEMBERING

  SELF

  CHAPTER 37

  PRESENT

  After leaving Kevin’s office, I walk, a particle in the bloodstream of the city. I let myself drift. Something comes to the surface in me. It is sadness, a deeper sadness than I can ever remember feeling.

  I am carried over east, past brick buildings, a flag, stained glass. These side streets that are always full of surprises. I’d forgotten that about New York. Between the fortresses of Park Avenue and the helter-skelter of Lexington, anything is possible. Maurice lived on a side street, farther east, past Lexington.

  What is Felicia doing now? Is she just coming home from some event? How many Lucky Charms would she have to eat to take in this news? I imagine telling her, her vicarious excitement. Drama!

  I want to know you, Kevin said.

  Have I known anyone my whole life?

  The past is swimming all around me. My father is not a bitter, twice-divorced teetotaler on an Exercycle in Connecticut, but a robust alcoholic in the middle of destroying one family and creating another. My mother, not a glorified secretary with a storage unit full of paintings, but instead a beautiful young woman, angry and searching.

  Maurice wanted my forgiveness. Can I give it to him? No. I can’t. I am angry. The stack of letters Kevin gave me are burning a hole in my bag.

  A bunhead passes me. Strange she would be so far east. She wears a leopard-skin hoodie, tight bright blue skirt, tights, espadrilles. Even through the Old Navy colors, I see her studio-pale legs, the battle between teenage softness and muscular power. Which one will win? She picks her way through the stream of people without looking at anyone. I must have looked like her, wandering through the city, devotee of a far-off god.

  When I see these bunheads roaming the New York streets, I want to kneel and kiss them. I want to punch them, break them.

  It’s the gloaming now. The West Side is still in sherbet colors, but here it’s night already. I reach Maurice’s old building, an inconspicuous six-story brick apartment building, similar to others around it. Still, I know it immediately. It now has an awning, but I recognize the glass d
oors and the tarnished gold handles. I peer into the windows closest to the ground. In one, a forest of plants, in another what looks like a piano, curtains in another. Who lives in Maurice’s sprawling (or do I just remember it as large?) second floor apartment now? Was it sold to pay for his care—all those years of care that I made necessary?

  As I stand there in front of this unobtrusive Manhattan apartment building, my mind lurches. It’s strange. Like some liquid that loosens concrete, turns it back into sand, one image dislodges another. And the images at first seem disassociated—as if they belonged to someone else. But then they heat up and my body responds. This is my memory. It belongs to me. It is me.

  I remember everything now.

  Maurice is there again, lit strangely by the light from Pavlova’s case, which is broken. Glass all around. There is still the old meanness and mischief around his mouth, but there is something new in his eyes. He says something, peevish, victorious, and I can hear it. “You shouldn’t have looked at me like that. You shouldn’t have always been saying, Touch me, Touch me. You should never have asked that.”

  I raise the fireplace poker, step closer, and then let it fall, and it lands on his back, I feel him curve beneath it. He raises his hand and sinks to the ground like something without bones. He moves in stubborn slow motion. He’s on the floor now. His mouth changes to a surprised smile.

  That wild, bewildered look crosses his face. “Beautiful,” he says. Then he closes his eyes.

  It all surges back into the center of my mind and explodes outward. All the pieces are fitting together, but I don’t really like the puzzle. I smashed the glass, I broke the humidor, I stole the shoe, I attacked him. But then there is the relief: I did not kill him. I am no murderer. But behind the relief there is something else, too.

  My memory of that night, of what I did—and the feeling of that in my body. I remember so clearly now, the cool metal, so uncompromising in my hand, the weight as I pulled it back against the air, and the relief as I let it drop. No, I don’t believe that, I swung it at him. He was a fire I wanted to put out.

  I could have killed him. I know that is true. I wanted to kill him. And—I wish—I watch this wish—that I had killed him that night.

  I shiver, though the breeze is strangely warm.

  I head back west. Then I’m on Park, going uptown, nodding at the doormen as I go. A new breeze, this one colder, comes up. I wrap my jacket tighter. I walk in and out, light and shadow under the awnings that stretch all the way curbside to waiting taxis.

  I have never been rid of him, not really, all these years.

  Flotillas of taxis move unceasingly toward, then past me. One stops to let an old man out. It takes an eternity for him to unfold his body.

  I see myself at Dad and Judy’s, a bunhead sleeping on a mattress on the floor, counting her calories to help her fall asleep. I thought I owned the world. What a fool is the girl who desires to be a princess, trapped in the tower of her own making.

  And now Kevin, his son. My son. Our son.

  Other parts of the city forget themselves again and again. Where Felicia is, for example. Warehouses, then bars, now condos. And the new people who come to live in them.

  Except Park Avenue perhaps.

  I end up in front of Dad and Judy’s old building on Seventy-ninth. Through the glass doors, I watch the doorman touch his hat as an elderly woman walks out of the elevator. He looks like a younger version of Felix, who would be retired by now. The uniform hasn’t changed either, green with gold buttons, like an old-fashioned elevator operator. An anachronistic world. The doorman tips his hat to a woman walking out into the night.

  Another piece of that night, a bit of memory, floats back to me. This one eases in gently, so at first I don’t even know I’m remembering. It feels just like thinking. I’m at Dad and Judy’s, I let myself in quietly; everyone asleep—down the hall to my room. There is blood on my shirt, and I take off my clothes, search my body for the wound that caused this blood—I can’t see it, but I can feel it. It’s my own wrongness, badness.

  I sit on my bed and let the vertigo take me. I remember being on the floor, on his scratchy ancient carpet, his broken body on top of me. I walk—slowly—to the bathroom, wash the blood from my shirt with freezing cold water, ball up the wet fabric and put it in the hamper. I open my dance bag and find inside Pavlova’s pointe shoe and Maurice’s little black book.

  I know there is never only one version of the past. We resurrect the past to suit the needs of the present. As I leave the fortresses of Park Avenue behind me and head to the boutiques of Madison, I understand something. Maurice didn’t belong to this world any more than I did. We were both pursuing something that we didn’t have a name for. We ended up calling it beauty.

  And what is beauty? A whiff of smoke. But felt with the force of a cannonball. When you see it, it pierces your eyes, the heart overflows, contracts.

  I have told myself that life inevitably ends in tragedy. Don’t the old ballet stories tell us so? Giselle, Swan Lake—those stories of betrayal, lost love, and untimely sacrifice.

  But I don’t know if that is true anymore.

  I gave up my innocence. But I went on living. Maybe this was the greatest crime—against him—and against myself.

  It is, maybe, neither of our faults. Where does outgrown anger go? Will it fade away?

  On a corner of Madison, here’s a photocopied LOST CAT sign on the lamppost. A fluffy white cat sitting on a brown leather couch. Have you seen her? Someone has scrawled over the sign in marker I FOUND HER! I touch the metal of lamppost on the corner and it’s still warm from the sun. I’m filled with strange good cheer. A lost cat. Found. Bravo!

  What should I have said to Kevin? I should have said, “I remember when I was pregnant with you. I remember feeling full for the first time in my life, I think. Then you were gone, and I missed you. The dream was over and another started.”

  I feel like I would die if I said that.

  I head south down Fifth and then west on Fifty-ninth, skirting the edge of the park. Little pools of streetlights follow the dark paths into the park. A horse and carriage clomps by, jangling its belled harness. I smell manure, leather, and perfume. Does the horse care about this performance? It has a job to do. It gets treats. Or is it whipped? Balanchine escaped the Russian Revolution, way before Stalinism set in. If he had stayed, he might have been killed. Instead, he came to America. He started a school. I was born in America. I went to his school. The accidents of history are everywhere. The carnage all around us.

  I pause in front of the Plaza, its big, subdued bluster lighting up the night, a quaint idea of itself for tourists, and also, still itself. I remember Dad and Judy going off to the Plaza one anniversary weekend. Sam and I avoided each other as much as possible, but one night we met in the dark kitchen and neither of us turned on the light, but instead we just stood in front of the refrigerator and ate straight from it without forks.

  I have never truly, entirely, felt what was done to me was “rape.” “Rape” suggests a finite act. What was done to me kept happening, went on and on. It is still happening to me. That one time produced a child that I was too young to carry. That time has never been over for me. The therapist I saw in my twenties wanted me to say “rape” because she was sure that my problem was I couldn’t admit what had happened to me. But I didn’t want to admit it. Because the word took away something too precious.

  After I stopped seeing the therapist, I studied harder and danced more. The incessant movement, and the academic work, did its job. They kept the pain muted but still present. That was optimal. A reminder of a part of me.

  A version of the past I could live with.

  I arrive at the Columbus Circle mall, which gleams upward in mirrored glass. When I lived in New York, all this would have been unthinkably tacky, but now it feels right. At the head of the circle, in front of one of Trump’s hotels, is a giant metal statue of the earth spinning on its axis.

  I am cry
ing, the kind of tears no one can see, that can be dismissed as watery eyes or an allergy.

  How does a city go on and on, remaking itself, losing itself?

  This city is a mirage, a dream. A world spilling out, too small for itself. My past is always alive, is always being made. I bend again and again to that humidor, that glass tube of light, and I smash it to the ground. In the moment when the glass shatters but before it hits the ground, I have broken what I am. I am in the state of becoming something else.

  I know where I will go tomorrow. The house that started it all.

  CHAPTER 38

  MAY 1980

  Mira’s body finally begins to change. Her breasts begin to show and her hips round slightly. It has taken her body a long time, but now it rushes to catch up.

  She’s hungry all the time. Her stomach lurches under her ribs. She eats some apple, some chips, some pie. She eats and eats. Something secret is growing inside of her. It is like a wild, unruly garden. It is something hungry and thirsty.

  She sits bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night, covered with sweat. Her body is limp, foggy, wet, wrung-out; in contrast, her mind is buzzing and razor sharp. She feels bad, really bad, a different kind of badness she does not even have the words for. It’s the opposite of how she feels when she is dancing.

  A month and a half after Mira’s birthday, one of the women of the pulled-back hair and buttoned blouses and gold pins—the one who met with her after the SAB audition—appears in front of Mira in the hallway. Her eyebrows are drawn together. Her face is strange and unseeing. “Mira,” she says. “Please come here.” Mira steps into the woman’s office. On her desk are the ledgers, the big books she sees her walking around with and consulting. A heavy green sky out her window makes Mira blink.

  Mira grips her bag tightly against her hip. She has never been called into an office before—is this being talked to? Usually, in a room full of girls all moving, she rises, bigger and stronger, out from under the blanket of tondues and pliés. She knows how to rise to be noticed within a line of girls, to stand straighter and command her legs to beat faster, to obey more quickly than the others. But, standing alone, in this blank office and faced with the woman’s face, some other face she does not know—not kind, not mean, and not anchored by any movement—she feels herself disappearing.